jesterKing's blog

Finally, after months of work, testing, debugging and fixing we have Cycles as a supported engine on the farm. You'll get the power of Cycles through CPU rendering on our grid, with the supported feature set. To be able to upload Cycles sessions you should make sure you have the latest uploader version, which you can find at Blender bf-extensions SVN. Place it in your Blender directory, and in there to 2.62/scripts/addons/

While Cycles renderer allows to easily render with parts, make sure you don't do postprocess compositing with the node editor, as for that the old restrictions still exist.

Since Cycles works differently from Blender Internal we can chop up the workload in two ways, before we recombine it all into the final rendering. With Blender Internal, at best we could divide the work for one frame into smaller sections of that frame. These parts would then be stitched together into the final frame. Some features of Blender Internal renderer make it quite hard to do dividing into smaller parts, especially since our grid is not build on one CPU and OS architecture.

Apart from chopping a frame into physical parts we can also divide the workload of calculating the samples. Lets say we have a session we want to render at 100 samples. We can divide the workload over 4 work units each of which will result in a 25-sample rendering.

By ensuring that each part is rendered with a different seed we can ensure that we don't get 4 times the same result, but instead get what we want. These subsample results we can all add together and average out so that in the end we have a 100-sample rendition of the frame.

The nice thing is that we can do both ways of dividing the calculation work at the same time. So we can divide the frame into 4 parts and each part into 4 subsample frame work units. The stitcher will take care of placing the result parts into the end frame and average out as needed.

What this means is that we can now also do high-sample renders for still, since the workload can be divided over many clients. For a 10.000 sample still we could divide the workload into 100 workunits each covering 100 samples. For huge renderers we'll probably also render it in parts, just to make sure that workunits won't be too long.

When Cycles supports the GPU properly through OpenCL, also for AMD/ATi cards, then we'll investigate how easily we can roll that out on our farm. That said, it is obvious that CPU rendering will allow us to run much larger scenes, since GPU RAM is still a very scarce commodity.

As final note, the CPU-support is restricted to the "supported feature set", so bear that in mind while preparing and sending your sessions for rendering on our farm.

Enjoy Cycles!

Those who have been following the forums and our IRC channel #renderfarm.fi on Freenode.net will know that we have users who are for unexplainable reasons unable to successfully upload sessions to our server using our wonderful integrated Uploader in Blender.

We have been investigating our logs a lot, tried many things, but still this remains as elusive as ever.

Now, we're determined to get it nailed and fixed, so I created a short video tutorial explaining how to create a net capture of a failing upload attempt. Please visit and watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr4J-sTlAQ4 to learn how to get one for Renderfarm.fi. I've attached the video to this post for your convenience :)

We ask those who experience the annoying upload problem to generate a net capture and to send us the resulting file. We hope that this will shed more light on what is going on. All of our developers have been unable to reproduce the issue, so we need to go low-level. A net capture will be tremendously useful.

Send your capture files to nathan@letworyinteractive.com, don't forget to mention your userid or username.

/Nathan

A few minutes ago I uploaded a new version of the ORE Uploader script. You can find it attached to the ORE Uploader howto page, at the end.

Since we're in open beta now, everybody should be able to register and participate in the renderfarm.fi effort.

If you like the uploader script (and even if you don't ;), please consider joining my team.

Since we will have quite some visibility during Assembly 2009 in Helsinki, I won't be surprised if we see a nice influx of new users for donating CPU cycles to render sessions sent in by you and me. I'll be shortly presenting the ORE Uploader during the seminar on Saturday the 8th of August, starting at 13:00

Do try to get your friends along and have them interested in 3D animation with Blender!

Enjoy ORE Uploader and renderfarm.fi

/Nathan